picklemeister [she/her]

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  • 62 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • trots were a lot more common ~30 years ago or so. swp (socialist workers party) was big (for an american communist party) when i was a kid and in true trot fashion ended up splitting into a number of nominally active and defunct parties. PSL actually comes from that lineage via the workers world party who split from swp. these days socialist alternative had been fairly active though they don’t come from the US swp tree. Kshama Sawant was a city councilor in Seattle under SA though i believe she also did a split along with a faction of that party. trots in general are still a going concern pretty much everywhere but with the frequency of party splits and the lack of the USSR as a foil you see where they get the reputation for factionalism and being smallish newspaper/book club orgs.

    i think to your first question there’s some accuracy there but, taking off my hexbear hyperbole hat, social democrats are common enough even if they don’t have the terminology for it and social democrats with neoliberal characteristics aren’t exactly uncommon anywhere you find social democrats. democratic socialists being social democrats is common enough to be a thing but it’s not a given and for some people this is a sort of intermediate stage. online is whatever, but Communist is a loaded term in the US when you’re interacting with the waking world where it’s much more rare to hear used as a descriptor and usually not without some meaning behind it. on-the-ground anarchists who use communist as a descriptor are usually anarcho-communists who work within mutual aid and bloc circles, ml and trot leaning people will usually have some sort of theoretical development even if it’s nascent or piecemeal. in the US those people are of course rare but that goes back to what I mean about ‘communist’ being a rare descriptor offline for a variety of reasons.